Jeff Carlson: Plague War

The Canadians planned to intercept them, lancing down out of British Columbia. The two North American nations had coexisted as friends and allies for nearly three hundred years, but now Canada would raid across the border in force, committing four full strike wings as a curtain against any Leadville ‚ghters. Newcombe wanted to head for Highway 65 just north of Roseville, and Ruth was tempted. She yearned for it. Safety. Warm food. Oh God, and a shower. But it would mean pushing farther north once they were across the sea, staying in the lowlands rather than hiking east into the mountains — and there was a deeper fear in her.

“Look.” Newcombe laid out the map with his naked hands, his knuckles bruised and scabbing. Then he edged his ‚nger slightly from Citrus Heights to Roseville. “Look how close. We could get there in a day or two.”

“I just don’t know,” Ruth said, touching the rough patches on her face where her own goggles had pressed in. She was thinking of the paratrooper ambush that had destroyed Newcombe’s squad. “They’d come in one of those big cargo planes, right?” she asked.

“Not necessarily. I’d send something small and fast.”

The thought of cramming herself into a plane made Ruth claustrophobic again and she glanced uneasily at the walls of the room. Not all of the ISS crew had survived the crash of the space shuttle Endeavour. “All it takes is one missile to bring us down,” she said, “and Leadville will do anything to keep anybody else from getting the vaccine. They’ve already shown that.”

“There are ways to defend against air-to-air missiles, especially if our escort doesn’t let anyone close,” Newcombe said. “And if we don’t do this, we’ll have to keep playing hide-andseek with the helicopters. We’ve been lucky so far.”

“But we’re so close to the mountains here!” Ruth met his blue eyes, pleading with him. “The whole idea is to spread the vaccine to as many people as possible, so no one can ever control or keep it.” She worried that the Canadian government would prove just as sel‚sh. Overall, their losses had been even worse than those in the United States, and they might view the nanotech as the same opportunity for conquest and rebirth.

“We’re not that close,” Newcombe said. “Look. Look where we are. It’s still a hundred miles to the Sierras and it’s going to keep getting more and more uphill. You have to realize we’re still weeks away from elevation. You don’t even know if anyone’s alive up there. We could wander around for another month just trying to ‚nd a mountain where someone’s survived this long.”

And they might be dangerous if they did, Ruth thought, unable to stop herself from glancing at Cam. It was a real concern. Lord knew some of those survivors would be too desperate to care why or how they’d come, but she didn’t say it. She wasn’t going to give Newcombe anything else to use against her. Ruth genuinely believed that most people would help them, and once they’d reached four or ‚ve groups they would be unstoppable, dispersing in every direction, ‚lling the dead zones of the plague like a new human tide.

“This is our best chance to get somewhere,” Newcombe said.

I’m stronger than you are, Ruth realized, but she needed to be careful. She couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him. “I just don’t like it,” she said.

Cam ‚nally interjected, and Ruth was grateful. “I know what I’d do,” he said. “This isn’t usable ground for them, not if we get away. If I was Leadville, if I thought the Canadians were going to take off with us, I’d just nuke the whole area. Here. Oregon. Wherever they could drop a bomb in front of us. There’s no way a plane can defend against that, right?”

“That’s crazy,” Newcombe said. “This is their own ground— it’s American soil.”

“No. Not anymore.”

“They’ll stick to conventional weapons,” Newcombe insisted. “Look, it’s a gamble either way, so we take our best bet. We get the rebels and the Canadians behind us.”

Ruth clenched her arm in its cast, wondering how deeply his training had affected his thinking. The need for structure. Newcombe was an incredible asset, a great soldier and obviously comfortable improvising in any situation, but he was still a soldier, with the expectation of ‚tting into a larger command.

He was going to be a problem.

“Do you want to get left down here?” he asked, gesturing at her broken arm. Had he seen the ‚st she’d made?

The infections last night scared him, she thought. Me, too. But at least she knew how rare it should be to hit a concentration that bad, especially once they got out of the delta.

“They’re willing to put a lot of lives on the line,” Newcombe said. “Fuel. Planes. Taking you north was always the plan, get you into a lab, make the vaccine better and then spread it everywhere.”

“We can still do that,” Ruth said, slowly. “We can do that after we’ve given the vaccine to a few people out here.”

Cam surprised her. “We could split up,” he said.

She was right that he had been uncertain but wrong about the biggest question on his mind. She’d thought he was halfway to agreeing with Newcombe to jump on a plane. Instead, he had found another way out of the box. He was willing to leave her— and it upset her more than she would have guessed. It made her angry.

“Why don’t we split up,” Cam said. “I can try for the mountains while you guys go to the rendezvous.”

It felt like betrayal.

They were on the water before the sun lifted clear of the mountains. They were well-practiced by now and stripped the house in ‚ve minutes, ‚nding a case of bottled water in the kitchen and a good haul of disinfectant, gauze, tape, and perfume in the bathrooms. Then they ran to the truck. Newcombe started it easily as Cam and Ruth climbed into the boat behind him. Everything looked good. But they were more silent than usual, Cam noticed, and he knew he’d frightened Ruth. Fine. She had to understand. He wasn’t her dog and he wouldn’t always say yes . Still, he caught himself looking for her eyes as Newcombe drove away from the house.

She ignored him. Armored in her goggles and mask, Ruth held tight to her seat, turned almost sideways because she could only use one arm.

The boat was a twenty-two-foot Champion, lean like an arrow and nearly as thin. With a hull less than three feet deep from top to bottom, it was more of a bass ‚shing platform than a riding craft. It had only two seats set in its smooth deck. The Champion was designed to speed ‚shermen from one good hole to the next, and that was perfect. Cam guessed that even the motor shaft wouldn’t stick more than a couple feet below the surface, which would be crucial out there in the ruins.

Newcombe drove to the shore slower than Cam expected. They must have reentered the hot spot as soon as they left the house, but the street barely had any downward slope and the waterline had crawled up and back many times, leaving thirty yards of muck and garbage in lines and dunes.

“Hang on!” Newcombe shouted. They crunched through styrofoam and plastic, a lamp shade, empty soda cans, and stinking damp clothing and paper. Endless skins of paper. Ahead of them, the shallow edge of the sea was thick with bobbing junk, clogged in between the homes on either side. Newcombe intended to drive straight in. The truck was a big monster. Newcombe thought it would keep churning until the water was deep enough to †oat the Champion off its trailer. He didn’t want to risk getting caught on something if they backed in like you were supposed to do.

Then the truck hit the water, clattering through the debris. They shuddered over something big. The trailer rocked up on one side and the boat slid the other way, almost bumping loose. They’d already removed the rope ties that secured the Champion to the trailer, not wanting to miss any surge that would carry it free. Now that seemed tremendously stupid.